Suggestions for E2

The nature of this node is going to be a bit different than what it was before. This is now an area to talk to the coders and the coders only about what you want e2 to be. What this means is that anything that you think has to change about e2 can't be anything that requires approval from Upper Management. Small stuff only. Cleaning up and mopping. Making the whole experience slightly more pleasant for our dear users. The cherry on top. The icing on the cake.

Here's an example of what could have been in this node:

"Dudes, Message Inbox really sucks. It's essentially useless unless you diligently keep on deleting all your messages all the time. I have over 9000 messages, and this makes it impossible for Message Inbox to ever finish loading. Can you fix it so it only displays a few messages at a time?"

Of course, that has been done. Message Inbox now only displays 100 messages at at time unlike our barbaric past, and it could probably still use other interface improvements.

Here's an example of what really isn't appropriate for this node:

"The whole XP system is really wrong. Here's my new scientifically-tested validation method that will change everyone's level, will eliminate the need for chings, and grants completely different level powers based on only 5 levels."

You get the idea. The less intrusive and controversial your proposed change, the more likely it is to get done quickly by some coder with too much time on her hands. Don't worry too much about how difficult your idea would be to code up, but do try to keep your suggestions short and simple. Think of this node as an extension of e2 bugs but not for things that are obviously wrong, only for things that could be improved.

"You know what would be kinda cool, at least for sick individuals like myself? Near the chatterbox maybe, set up a meter or something that updates the current estimated births, deaths, and the overall number of people on the planet generally."

Shouldn't the 'I Like This!' button remain on writeups until a user gets votes? As it is, we are taking an option away when people log in.

Now that we have categories we need some more umph in the category management system. I would like two major changes: 1 a more customizable 'add-to-category' drop-down menu, so that I am not bothered by all the odd categories that guest user can add too; 2 perhaps a 'Category maintainer' usergroup, which is added to all new categories as a default maintainer? (Removable as the creator wishes, of course). Right now all categories are automatically wide open or very restricted. We need a middle ground, an easy way for a person who is interested in ordering the database to get into the mix. Of course, another option would be to encourage all categories that are not inherently personal in nature to be maintained by 'guest user' (a label that needs to be changed, BTW), or to actively encourage all usergroups to get started on maintaining those categories that it would be appropriate for them to maintain.

Again, with categories: it would be great if there was a way to automatically 'order list' when editing categories, most obviously, to order the list alphabetically. It might also be nice to order the list by author, randomly, or by rep, although that would only work for categories built from individual writeups.

Following categories does not make softlinks between the nodes. I would think that it would be nice if it did.

It would be amusing to run some scripts to create some categories -- "E2's best writeups" (with reps of over 100); "E2's best Poetry" (Poetry nodetypes with rep over 50), etc.

I would love a nodelet that lists my "recently used drafts".

Drafts do not really communicate how the 'request review' feature works. Perhaps once a review has been 'completed' (feedback has been sent), the draft should wait 24 hours (to allow for further reviewing if editors are so inclined) and then automatically label itself as public (or private?) rather than review?

Firmlinks need to be more apparent, and this is most particularly true in the case of nodeshells with firmlinks. When the firmlink is the most important content in the node(shell), it needs to be the first thing that grabs your eye. So, bigger and more central, basically.

I would like to have multiple 'Personal Links' nodelettes. And be able to title them as you wish. And have 'vitals' and 'epicenter' be editable in the same way as is 'personal links'. In other words, every nodelet should be editable in basically the the same way a writeup is; I should certainly be able to control every link in every nodelet, and probably control the font size and the whitespace surrounding them too.

I would love it if Writeyps by Type (or ENN) had 'hasvoted class' -- that is, you could easily see what you had voted on.

When adding a writeup to an already filled node, I find it annoying to start a draft and then have to open a new window so that I can look back at the other writeups in the node. Perhaps the draft could remain at the bottom of the actual node, but the window could always return to the draft textbox when updating?

Perhaps a hit counter on nodeshells? Then we could have your nodeshells sortable by hits. It would be very motivating to have a top ten list of 'most searched for nodeshells'.

An option to have blind voting booth show a node at a time rather than just a writeup. Also, an option in the voting booth to show only writeups from people who have been logged in in the last week (might as well give feedback to people who are still around!)

I personally would love an option to have votes converted automatically from my GP stock after I run out of votes for the day: have the epicenter say 'out of votes', but keep the vote buttons on the writeups I visit. Any time I vote E2 gift shop would automatically deduct one GP from my account. (The more I think about this the more I want it.) (And still, months latter, my desire continues to increase!)

Perhaps one level bonus (or just plain feature) could be the ability to put a "preferred bookmark" on your homenode -- essentially a 'window' to the writeup in the style of cream of the cool. Not actually something I'm burning to have myself, but it came to me suddenly in a vision, and I thought I'd pass it on.

Link view currently shows nodeshells in brown, but in large nodes (like noders' poetry and Humorous Writings of E2) it can still be time consuming to pick these out. Since the links in link view are not in alphabetical order anyway, why not order them nodeshells first and then filled nodes? Links are sorted into 'Existing' and 'Non-Existing'. Is this new, or am I missing something? -djNodeshells are sprinkled randomly in the 'existing category'. -- Tem42

Also, Suggestions for E2 and E2 bugs should probably be allowed to have softlinks at the bottom. This is exactly the sort of node that we want people to find in as many ways as possible.

Certain accounts, such as Content_Salvage and Terranova should have some sort of connection to their caretakers. Either send out a notification (through the inbox or through the notifications nodelet) to the caretaker whenever a message is received, or have another nodelet/inbox on the caretaker's sidebar. Failing that, bounce back any messages to these 'ghost' users with a "please contact X with any questions or comments" message.

Now that we have categories, it would be nice to be able to type in a list of node titles to create a category, and not have to visit each node separately. This would allow categories to include things that are not noded yet, which is entirely appropriate. It might mean that it would have to be easier to delete members of categories.

A preview mode for usergroup discussion posts would be nice, but definitely not critical.
I would like to see nodeshells get the same deletion treatment as regular nodes. That is, at minimum, I'd like to be notified when a nodeshell of mine is deleted, as well as who has deleted it.
It's probably on the books already, but being able to choose a criteria for sorting the Other Users list would be nice.
Timestamps on C!s when viewing a list of nodes a particular user has C!ed
On nodes that have been marked for destruction, we should be able to see both what the current rep of the node and the editor who marked the node.
Can I have a /lick command? No special reason, I just think we should be able to lick noders.
Rootbeer allowed styling usernames in the chatterbox; could we get the same functionality on the Other Users list? I currently use it to mark known trolls and whatnot; being able to see this at a glance without having to load the catbox would be nice.
Instead of using a checkbox and (r) for all of the chatterbox functions, why not just do (d)(a)(r)? The checkbox should still be available when viewing the message inbox for mass deletion purposes. Bonus: For new users, show it as (delete)(archive)(reply) to avoid mismsgs.
Buttons for user-specific actions such as drag & borg on the Other Users list for chanops purposes would go a long way to making our job easier.
Can we have the E2 Email back?
A "clear all" button for the Notifications nodelet would be great.
What's the point of allowing unvotable nodes to post unhidden? It would be more work not to. And they're only a temporary kludge. -djNo point at all. You can't any more.-dj
Private Categories would be nice, as well as the ability to rename or remove them. On top of that, I'd like to be able to filter the Categories nodelet by maintainer since I don't usually care about anyone else's categories besides my own.
Some kind of new node posting speedbump oriented at newer users ("I see you've posted three nodes in the last ten minutes. Maybe you should give it another fifteen before posting something else?") seems like it could be useful. I imagine the editors are already doing something like this but it seems like one of those few chores we could safely automate without pissing anyone off.
Can someone change the list in the Drafts back to a numbered list? It was a lot easier to refer to specific drafts by number than by title.The old list was in creation order. The new one is alphabetical, which makes things easier to find. dj

There are still a lot of tables here. Getting rid of the remaining tables, tightening up the HTML so there are fewer extraneous wrappers around elements, and using classes and IDs more deliberately would go a long way toward making a better interface possible.

The problem with tables is primarily one of inaccuracy, but this is obviously not a site striving to win any awards for its semantic markup, so that might not seem directly relevant. HA. This is a site with a wealth of content, and little else to show for itself. For the benefit of those who've put their time into creating content here, that content should be marked up correctly so that it's more findable, and perhaps even one day consumable. However, it would be a lot more findable if the site didn't look like a museum piece and could be updated with a more modern, more tightly edited UI. If you want an additional update on the importance of a good UI, let me know and I'll talk your ear off. Assuming we're already on the same page though, removing the tables and replacing them with elements that don't dictate their layout in regard to the elements around them makes it much easier to move pieces around, show and hide them based on a user's selected level of granularity, and of course to style them as containers for content instead of cells in a spreadsheet. Done correctly, this should reduce page weight, requiring both fewer HTML tags and less CSS because less nesting (and therefore less inheritance) will be needed. It'll make it easier for any JavaScript traversing the DOM for elements to act on to find what it needs. And it'll make maintainability easier because there will be less junk and more content (or its substitute, template tags). You should see an increase in both page and development speed. Also it's the correct way to write HTML, and has been for over a decade.

--------------

Also, as far as the interface, condense FAQs and administrative functions (Epicenter, Vitals, etc.) and make them available as a drop-down menu. Reserve the right bar for status stuff like Other Users, New Writeups, and the catbox. Move current user information from the Epicenter to the top of the page so it's always available but not pushing other content down.

I think it would be nice if Findings: could indicate whether a node is a nodeshell. Sometimes I don't care, but frequently I'd like to know whether there's anything there before I decide what to click on.

And hardlinks? (Or perhaps not—I'm currently styling nodeshells using the :after pseudo-element in css, and while it's fine in a list of links, it really wouldn't look nice inside a writeup. But other treatments might look better.)

That other place does something like this (using the colour of the link as an indicator), but we'd have to implement it differently. For them, it's about whether the page exists. With findings and softlinks, we know the node exists; the question is whether there are any writeups in it. With hardlinks, it's more complicated, because the presence of a hardlink does not guarantee the existence of a node.

alex sez: Show and order by writeup count for e2node results for logged-in users maybe? Reasonable or too many hits on the nodegroup table?

I like a lot of the suggestions above, too, but the one that I've really been wishing for already is mauler's. Archiving messages from the Catbox would be great.

I'd like to see it made easier to treat an author's writeups as a "collective work". Any chance of making the "list author" page more navigable? What I would really like, is that when you are on the page for a specific writeup (not node) you could navigate backwards and forwards through that author's whole body of work with arrows on the top line... So I could just go through, for instance, Augustine's body of work in sequence without a mess of tabs and an indexing page.

This might prove a disincentive to asamothing, too, since old writeups wouldn't be sitting quite as much in isolation.

mauler says: I really like this idea, I wonder how hard it would be to implement...

alex sez: Probably not as simple as it sounds. Users have some writeups that form a logical sequence and many that do not. I'd expect that most writers would not want their writeups treated as a collective work. It also does not work for collaborations by multiple authors. An alternative would be to set up a "forward/backward" table in which a user can manually enter the preceding and following instalment of a writeup series, thus giving the user complete control over the feature and making it easier to detect gaps. I'm not sure that any other way of doing it would be useful or popular.

I have many suggestions, the best one I can think of right now is to create a system of icons for "my achievements" that could be displayed optionally on a user's homenodes. Nothing too big, just little .png images to show the things in "my achievements", as well as on completion of a quest.
alex sez: Already part of the plan. Haven't found designers and coding time for it yet.My second suggestion would be that the level names be renamed, with much more input from the users. I know that the fashionable opinion is to say that "XP is an imaginary number given to you as strangers, treat it as such", but I actually have some emotional investment in the work I do here on e2. When all of us from e2 meet in our secret global conspiracy meetings, ala Seele in Neon Genesis Evangelion, I don't think we should greet each other as Poobah. Or even Grand Poobah. Apparently this belongs somewhere else, and my complaint came at the wrong time.
mauler says: GF, please don't imply that level titles were simply imposed without much input from users. I had a node up for quite a while in Novemebr so that users could comment on the level titles, and numerous noders took advantage. I took pretty much all reasonable suggestions for name changes. Some people actually felt there weren't *enough* silly titles like "poobah." You can't please everyone, I guess.

There should be a way to see how long the catbox topic has been up. Sometimes I want to change the topic, but it would be rude to change it if its only been up a few hours.

I would love it if there were a link somewhere that would direct people to a list of recently updated Home Nodes. Each user could have the option of staying out of the list, but that would save a lot of clicking around.

Searching through that thing is horribly difficult and I was thinking: maybe a search option would be a decent addition?

Here is the problem: I can’t find messages that are in reply to a node of mine, unless I go through them all and scan all of my messages. This is a pain. I would like to suggest a “show by reply” option, wherein I can type the name of the node and it displays all the messages that are in reply to that. If that were implemented, I would like to suggest that it would also encompass replies to scratchpad titles. (Depending how you do this, I guess this wouldn't be a problem.)

However, much more useful (in my mind) would be a simple search option. (I have been told this would take a while to actually do any searching on, but I figure, pain of slowness is better than the pain of manually searching.)

Supposing a user once sent me a message containing the word “peanuts” and all I could remember was that word, well, I’d like to find that message again! Scanning through the inbox would be terrible, when looking for just one word. So in that case a search option would be wonderful!

I would hope for a search option to work with the “show from user(group)”/“hide from user(group)” options as well.

I would prefer the search option, but I don’t know what my fellow noders would rather, or what you would prefer to code. Please question me if you aren't sure what exactly I am thinking of.

Another idea that is basically the same as mine but encompasses more usefulness and has been suggested by Tem42, and now also Pandeism Fish, and I think would be brilliant, is this:

Messages about a writeup 'stick' to that writeup -- when you went to edit a writeup you might see (in a separate nodelet or right under the blab box on your writeup) all the messages sent from that writeup. They would, of course, disappear when you deleted them. No need to search at all.

I think that, when editing a w/u, this would be highly useful. Rather than swapping tabs/windows to see all the spelling errors someone has found, they are right beneath it. Not sure how hard it would be to do, though...

(Being able to see your comments to another user's writeup would also be dandy, because I have a poor memory).

How about keeping track of notifications? Certainly beyond 20 or 30 is not needed, but sometimes they get pushed off too fast and you'll want to know what happened when. I suggest a small link to "Notifications archive" in the bottom right-hand corner of the nodelet.

More search options for the search bar. Before I go around creating node titles, I like to know what there is out there that has been unfilled. "Near matches", "Ignore exact" and "Full text" are wonderful, but why not have an option to display only nodeshells? Or only not nodeshells? Could be implemented in Random Nodeshells as an option, I guess..?

You know how we can backup our nodes? Perhaps we could also have an option to do that with scratch pads (including private ones).

Under "buying eggs" in the E2 Gift Shop I would love an option to buy more than one at a time. How can I go on a successful egging spree if I must sit and continuously click for more? Done by raincomplex

I thought about re-ordering my nodelets, and then I discovered this would be a horribly long and arduous process of clicking "up" and "down" until I get them right. Could we have a system whereby we order them by numbers, and we type them in 1-x with 1 being the one at the top of the page and x being the one right at the bottom. Or just something that doesn't involve heaps of clicking. DonJaime did this!

cc on msg box: I second DimView's request for this; I may have inspired it.

No borders on user-coded tables. When I submitted July 4, 2009, text floated magically in the cells and columns where I placed them, with no visible strings and wires. I was able to add borders where I felt them appropriate, by using the <table>'s "border" attribute.

An hour or two later, someone apparently changed the CSS for tables such that every cell has a thin border. While I agree there may be situations where this looks nice, I feel it destroys some subtle options for placing text that would otherwise be empowered by <table>. Case in point, my WU looks butt ugly now – was that effect intended? I'd like to see this change undone, please.

Voting on Suggestions for E2. Was it a management decision that this corner of E2 doesn't have voting?

To (possibly) make life a little easier for stylesheet designers, is it feasible to insert links (with CSS selectors) to the major sections of E2 into the code of every page (hidden by default)?

I'm thinking anything currently in a nodelet, plus a couple of things not presently covered like News for Noders, Cool User Picks and Staff Picks. This would make it easier to consistently style pages regardless of their content, and also make possible themes that don't rely on particular nodelets being enabled/disabled by the user.

Pageload-wise, perhaps a more efficient alternative could be to provide NFN and CUP nodelets. Having said that, there's something to be said for making possible themes that can work with all nodelets turned off.

Sorta-related, I think it would also be useful if CSS selectors could be added to the entries in the 'vitals' nodelet, and/or (as above) if they could be made available outside the nodelet structure.

Add a "last modified" timestamp for writeups, placed near the creation timestamp. For existing or unmodified writeups, don't display anything. Add a page like Everything New Nodes and a nodelet like New Writeups, but for recently modified nodes.

Make the voting buttons ('up' and 'down') visible to Guest User but when they click on them, redirect them to the registration page. The idea is that this will show the interactivity of E2 and get more people involved who wouldn't be otherwise (in theory).

Separate the message inbox from the chatterbox. The current system is pretty unintuitive to new users and the fact that the message inbox is displayed with the chatterbox doesn't help the matter. One way to fix this would be to make the Message Inbox its own nodelet to prevent the confusion. This could be supplemented by putting a link to the Message Inbox in the Epicenter and, if possible, tracking whether a message has been read or not. If any messages are unread, the text on the link for 'Message Inbox' would change to red (or some other eye-catching color) with the number of unread messages next to it in parentheses. For example, if I had 6 unread messages, the link would show up red with the text 'Message Inbox (6)'.

Maybe just combine these two?Chatterbox links to Chatterlight, Chatterlight should link to Chatterlighter. As it is, Chatterlighter is impossible to find unless you know where to look. Chatterlight links to itself and that's just not very helpful.

Archive button for private messages where they appear in the Chatbox.

Sent Messages page. Would be nice to see what you've said without having to CC every time.

I'm currently working on stealing various people's CSS to make the sidebar more flexible. Hoping that the option to hide it is incorporated into the new layout I hear is in the works.

Please. Put the server/local time in the Zen Epicentre - given that more people are using this, and it's on every page...it can't be that hard.

Could we please have the ability to create softlinks from a draft attached to a node/shell?

The "Keep updating" message in chatterlight and chatterlighter is in an odd place. It impinges on the topic, and the text is larger than the topic, too.

While we're about it, how about an "archive" and "cc" box anywhere I can reply to, or send a message?

Some way of displaying stars awarded at E2 Gift Shop? Silly, but I know several people who would like that sort of a thing.

When stars were approved, it was with the explicit caveat that they not be displayed in any way because otherwise they would become a game that people would compete at. It's intended as an entirely-private attaboy. -om 2011 Feb 20

Note Actually, I'd like to see the ones I have collected. I'm not talking about having them public. Maybe I should've made that clearer.

A Year Ago Today is really cool, but I'd love to have a shortcut to any date - any chance of a calendar selection widget?

I'm arguing in favour of something that will enable better formatting and layout of tables. Control over cellpadding would be good, and/or the ability to tweak table seetings in Zen.

Would it be possible to have something to identify our "favourite" users when they are online? Possibly a notification, Zen highlighting? Just a silly thought.

The Registry information on homenodes looks just awful. Any possibility of making it prettier, and/or guving control over where it goes? Myself, I'd like to see it in the rest of the hn stuff, with the motto and such.

Editor-only

When reparenting writeups, how about an option to delete the old containing node, if empty?

There is a limit to the length of nuke messages, that includes the name of the node and whatnot. It would be nice to not have the message overflow. I'd love some sort of warning or preview - even a "number of characters left" would be nice, that takes into account the total length of the message. That, or make the message longer. Or both. But i hate the idea that my message is truncated without my knowledge.

I would like to be able to take my e2 messages from e2 and store them with my other (email and SMS) messages in my epic personal message archive, which is nearly complete back to 1997 or so. And greppable! I expect many users would like to liberate their e2 messages from the e2 website as well.

I currently use some cobbled-together XSLT to convert Private Messages Ticker to a unix spool file, and take it from there. (Sadly, I have to download the Private Messages Ticker and do it all locally - much better to have the XSLT hosted on e2 so I could just download the spool file result. But I digress.)

In both these systems, as in e2 life generally, there is no "sent" box, so all my own wit and wisdom is lost. I can no longer be confident that there has been any.

Therefore, I propose a new feature - imap.everything2.com , which allows any e2 user to connect with their favourite email client, and view their private messages, group messages and sent messages, and if they so desire, copy or move them off site.

I would like to be able to set a bounty of more than 10% of current GP in Everything's Most Wanted; my assumption is that this 10% thing is from back when XP was the One Currency and its large-scale transfer had to be curtailed.

Also, I'd like it if Categories could be embedded into writeups, producing something like the metanodes of old, because the way they're set apart from the nodes proper now is really not productive, they're practically hidden. (OldMiner blarted something about how they already were integrated, in Zen, but when I checked this it appeared he was only referring to the little category navigation thing in the footer which not only shows up but is actually more sensibly formatted in Jukka and which is the thing I'm referring to when I say »practically hidden«. If it transpires that he was actually right about this, feel free to disregard the suggestion.)

Thanks for implementing my last suggestion re: allowing users to send their own w/us back to draft. Here's an additional refinement:

Whenever a published writeup is sent back to draft, please retain its timestamp, reputation score, and chings. Please display the info on the drafts page as "Previously published on: June 13, 2011. Rep +11/-3. 2C!s: N0b0dy, nate."

That way, if a user decides to republish it later, they can put it back into the nodegel right where it was before, instead of putting it at the top of New Writeups with a new timestamp and 0 rep.

Right now, we have "published writeups" and "drafts". What I'm suggesting instead is that "published writeups" and "draft writeups" aren't two different objects. They're the same object (a "writeup"), in two different states.

Three states actually:

"private writeups" (viewable by only you)

"draft writeups" (viewable by all logged-in users)

"published writeups" (viewable by everyone, everywhere).

For simplicity's sake, please pare down the other radio-button options from that growing list under "Draft status" in Drafts.

Please make "findable" a checkbox (or, IMO, just make all non-private writeups findable and nix that fiddly option). Please make "review" a button (e.g. "Add to review queue"/"Remove from review queue"). Please eliminate the "removed" option altogether; it's a meaningless distinction in this context. Please also eliminate the "shared" state; that's covered by the "Share with" box below (plus, it's not a distinct state: private w/us, draft w/us, and-- theoretically-- published w/us can all be shared).

And finally, a controversial one: You know those "Attachment and Publishing" controls on Drafts? Please put those on published writeups too. That way, users will be able to move their writeups from one node to another without an admin ever having to sully their hands with it. (note: I think that's a solid WIN all the way around, but I suspect a few establishment-types might bristle at the notion. If not, well, full steam ahead!)

Originally posted 4 september:
I'd love to see an enhancement to the new drafts systems that allows one to schedule a time to publish the draft automatically.

Interface-wise, this could be a third option on the Drafts page, next to "attach to page" and "publish"; perhaps "publish on:" followed by a set of text boxes for DD/MM/YYYY.

21 September:

The various pages involved in drafting and submitting writeups should feature prominent links to E2 Quick Start for level 0 users. Good locations would be a prominent link and brief explanatory paragraph above the drafts list and below the page heading on the "Drafts" page, and another, smaller link just above the draft preview on the individual draft edit page.

Messages

Include *sent* messages in our messages archive! Archiving my private messages is cool, but I only get one side of the conversation and later on have no idea what *I* was talking about. Is it possible to include our own sent messages in that list for potential archiving?

Message backup! We can offline archive nodes...it'd be cool if we could do the same for messages.

Categories

(pretty much all my gripes were handled and addressed, so w00t for the coderz.)

Quest Nodes

Given that we now have categories, it'd be cool if there were 'Quest' nodetypes which could be given a category name and a start and end date. Then it would display all nodes in the relevant category that were posted between the start and end dates. Simple and would make tracking quests so much easier! Categories could be made in advance to reserve the name as private, then changed to 'public' when the quest opens and back to 'private' when it closes? Does that work?

I wonder if one could write a 'most wanted' nodeshell generator, finding the nodeshells linked to the most in the text of existing write-ups. When I fill a nodeshell, I think of it in terms of plugging a hole in the database, so something to put these lacunae in perspective would be cool.

Categories:

I want there to be a button that lets me alphabetize categories. Not being able to do this is a big concern, especially in the larger categories!

Completely fanciful content editor script idea:

A program that searches common misspellings through the full text search, then lists the instances discovered and displays their context. Judging from the context, a content editor can then choose to push a button that automatically finds and replaces the typo in the writeup and send a /msg to the author indicating the change.

Why make special checks in the code for maintenance nodes, definitions, and (especially) individual writeups marked as unvotable? If you don't want people voting on it, don't post it as a writeup (make it a public draft, document, etc. instead).

Reputation graph should have different time granularity options than just monthly, and a different viewing window than just the last 6 years. When a writeup has been around a long time, the graph that's shown just doesn't provide any useful information.

Please add LaTeX rendering to writeups for less pain when creating math writeups. Recently, it has become much easier to do add such functionality to sites thanks to MathJax. (We probably don't need a GUI; most users who intend to use it probably already know LaTeX)

For an example of math writeup pain, see Fourier Transform. Chris essentially had to paste/bold every symbol and he still couldn't get integrals or square roots to render. Nails on a blackboard I tell you. Nails on a blackboard...

While searching for a specific recipe I used Writeups by Type, but when the list displayed it didn't seem to have any rhyme or reason. I feel there should be a second selector to show the list ordered by oldest, newest, or alpha.